‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Birth Ritual

It feels like Yellowjackets is about to change, and for the better. In fact, maybe it’s already happened. In Season 2 Episode 6 (“Qui”), momentous events take place in both the present and the past. In the former, the gang’s all here: Shauna, Taissa, Misty, Natalie, Van, and Lottie end the episode face to face for the first time in 25 years, each bearing the weight of her own secrets and regrets; the unspecified terrible things they did in the woods loom over them like a threatening wave. 

And in the past, the moment the survivors have waited for for months has finally arrived: Shauna gives birth. A full episode passes before we really learn how that birth turns out. It’s another point of no return.

A dangerous one, I think. The girls have already done strange and in some cases unspeakable things out there, of course. Aside from the people killed in the plane crash, they’ve lost three other survivors to mishap or murder. One of these dead survivors, they ate. Misty may seem chastened by her accidental manslaughter of Crystal, but Lottie’s malign influence over the group is only growing, with characters beginning to offer blood sacrifices to the spirit of the wildnerness. Shauna’s baby gave them all a rallying point, something to look forward to, something to work together to preserve and protect, a reason to get back home. With that gone, what’s holding them together at all now?

This is what Shauna’s elaborate hallucination/dream/nightmare/fantasy/whatever seems to presage. It’s primarily concerned with her struggle to get her baby to feed from her. It’s a glimpse of her worst fear, that the baby won’t survive, but her mind presents this fear to herself in more manageable form. Indeed, when she finally hears that the baby was stillborn, she screams and screams that she can still hear the baby crying. Her mind can’t cope with the reality to which her brain had constructed a difficult but ultimately successful alternative.

But that’s not the only thing she envisions. She sees Lottie successfully breastfeeding the baby, an indication of her growing power. And in a dream within the dream, she is drugged by Natalie and awakens to find the rest of the survivors, even anti-cannibalism Coach Ben, devouring her child like a team full of soccer-playing Saturns. I suppose it’s a good thing that the team seems nearly as devastated by the baby’s death as she is in reality, but this isn’t the kind of paranoia that’s easily shaken off. Her grief may only give it rocket fuel. 

(As a side note, please pay attention to the way Ben is losing it, having strange glitchy visions of his friends from civilization that seem to bleed into the cabin. The group pretty much govern themselves, but whatever authority he has left is crumbling, even if they don’t know it yet.)

The present-day material is, as is customary, a comparativelymixed bag. I enjoy the interplay between Taissa and Van, women whose one-time intimacy was ruptured by the horror of their time in the woods, reconnected by a fluke of Taissa’s nervous system or by supernatural forces beyond her control, take your pick. Natalie and Lottie, meanwhile, vibrate with a new energy now that they’re openly discussing the possibility that they dragged whatever was out there — “the god of that place,” Lottie calls it — back with them.

I’m less crazy about an obvious busybody and whack job like Misty effortlessly insinuating herself into Lottie’s quasi-cult, the rest of whom seem well adjusted by comparison. And the fallout from Shauna’s affair/murder caper continues to be the weakest spot in the series despite game performances from literally every character involved; it’s simply not being written with a seriousness commensurate with how every other life-and-death scenario is being treated this season, from Crystal’s fall to the baby’s stillbirth. The energy is just way off.

Which is a big reason why it’s such a pleasure and relief to see Shauna show up at Lottie’s compound mere moments before Taissa and Van do. The how sees it too: After giving us what I imagine will be an iconic shot of the five other women side by side, it cuts to an overhead view and reveals that Lottie’s apiary has been arranged, consciously or not, in the shape of the mysterious symbol from the woods. 

In his book It, to which Yellowjackets owes no small debt, Stephen King uses a line from Neil Young to describe the passage from rationality and solidity and sanity into the supernatural abyss: out of the blue, into the black. I really, really hope that’s where we’re finally headed.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.